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Ferrari came to Miami with upgrades, genuine pace through the opening phases of the weekend, and a podium in the sprint race for Leclerc. By Sunday evening, Fred Vasseur was describing it as a particularly heavy day for the team.
Everything Fell Apart in the Race
The problems started almost immediately for Hamilton. "In the first lap we lost part of the front bargeboard on Lewis's car, and that was effectively the end of his race." He finished sixth, which limited the damage but felt like a wasted opportunity given how the car had been performing through practice and qualifying.
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Leclerc's afternoon was more complicated. He had genuine podium pace in the opening stint, running in free air and managing his tyres well. The safety car changed everything. "After the safety car everyone bunched up and it became much harder," Vasseur explained. "You had two completely different situations: first we were running our own pace, then it became all about energy management and that was a lot more difficult."
Leclerc lost ground from the front group, made a mistake in the closing stages, and collected a time penalty on top of that. He was classified eighth, a result that is difficult to reconcile with the raw pace he had shown earlier in the weekend.
Tyres Were the Underlying Problem
Vasseur pointed to tyre management as the thread connecting all of Ferrari's difficulties. "It came down to tyre management and temperatures from the start. Once you are in the right window you have the pace, but it is very easy to fall out of it." The SF-26 appears to have a relatively narrow operating window, and when race conditions shift unexpectedly, as they did after the safety car, Ferrari struggle to find it again quickly enough.
The overall picture from Miami is a team that is genuinely fast in controlled conditions but fragile when the race stops following a predictable pattern. That is a solvable problem in theory, but solving it requires consistency that Ferrari have not yet found.
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